The butter aisle

After work the other night I walked to wallyworld to purchase some conveniently packaged, life bestowing protein and carbohydrates. I had a drink or 3.14 beforehand of course, because doing that makes walking easier. More ENDURABLE and more INTERESTING, and less SHITTY.

When I got to the wallywhirle, I headed for the butter aisle, and as I was zeroing in on the specific butter that I wanted, and drawing a bead on it, I saw a young, pretty, by herself lady-woman-girl (I notice these things) vectoring in on the same butter. And, just as I imperceptibly crooked my noggin a little to acknowledge the new traffic in the butter aisle, the young-pretty-lady-that-probably-wanted-some-butter did an abrupt 90 degree turn away from the butter and toward the chicken.

Huh.

Do you think that maybe she just up and suddenly changed her mind about the butter and realized that it was chicken that she needed all along? No? Neither do I. I think that she was scared of me, and that she wanted to avoid an almost-close type of situation. Hell, it ain't a big deal... it happens all the time, and I mean All The Time. I just don't ever get used to it, is all. So what happened next was, these here words pooped out of my mouth...

"Sorry, I just need some butter and I'll be out of your way in half a second, sorry... I'm already gone, the butter sections all yours."

See what I mean about me being an inexcusable asshole? I can't help it. Actually, I probably could help it, but it would take practice and whatever. Anyway. So after converging with the butter margarine thing... whatever it was that I thought I needed. That thing. After I finally got there, I grabbed one of 'em and then wheeled my punk ass over to the egg section, feeling just a little discombobulated about the butter lady thing that had just happened.

Once I got to the egg section, I grabbed a six-pack of eggs (ain't it cool that eggs come in six-packs?) and opened it, so as to inspect it for cracks and greeblies, and as I was doing that, I was saying out loud in a conversational tone, just to myself, see? I was saying to myself, out loud...

"See, I'm a normal person too, like you. I know, I know... I'm a scary looking sumbitch, but I need eggs that ain't cracked, just like everybody else. I can't voodoo a cracked egg, you know."

And just as I finished saying that at full volume, thinking that I was relatively alone in the egg section, well, there was the butter lady from before, like... two feet away. Right there, see? RIGHT THERE!

Fuck.

You think I'm making this up? Nope. My life is a continuous, poorly written horror sit-com sci-fi wanna be dramatic series, which is always always always in the process and on the verge of being, but not quite, cancelled. And nobody watches it anyway.

INEXCUSABLE INFORMATION

CRITICAL UPDATE
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Today I made a discovery of multi-dimensional proportions and unparalleled magnitude. After several minutes of thoughtful contemplation, I have now realized that the widespread dissemination of this information could potentially lead to a paradigm shift of unprecedented scale, the repercussions of which would absolutely, likely be devastating to something or another... probably global civilization. Plus you, personally. Therefore, I strongly feel that my initial reticence toward unleashing this potential Planet Buster upon The Planet is thoroughly justified.

However...

If there's one thing I absolutely know that I have zero chance of misunderstanding about my own understanding of myself, plus the public, which includes myself, is that that misunderstanding would necessarily be the understanding of the public demand for the truth, and by 'the public', I mean of course, you, dear reader, and also myself. We demand the truth, don't we? We know we do. Allow us to demonstrate...

Try to think of a word that rhymes with truth that doesn't sound silly when spoken out loud, over and over.

See? You demand the truth, and nothing but the truth will do of course, and I know this about you. Now, I don't wanna be a party poop, but this next part pretty much has to come next.

It all started with a dream I had several months ago. In this dream I was at work, checking a never-ending line of customers. After each customer, I'd crumple up the receipt and toss it into the wastepaper basket behind me, but every time, it would miss and land on the floor or under the counter. This continued for an interminable amount of dream-time, until the mountain behind me finally collapsed upon my head and back, suffocating me and crushing me underneath an avalanche of used receipt paper.

Ever since then, and until just a few hours ago, I've been living that nightmare at work each day, hundreds of times a day, with my ever mounting anxiety continuing to mount, like that ever mounting mountain of receipts... and like that mountain, I fully expected my sanity to collapse very soon, instantly transforming me into a pile of wet, gibbering idiot.

Today my fears were finally realized, as just a few hours ago I was blithely tossing a crumpled up piece of receipt paper directly through the unoccupied space immediately to the left of the wastepaper basket. At that moment my sanity choose to finally and unexpectedly collapse, just like I knew it would, and for a few seconds I really was a pile of wet, gibbering idiot.

However... I wasn't just any idiot, wet or gibbering or otherwise. I was an idiot savant! Oh, the memory of such glorious terror, of knowing the sheer slobbering genius of retarded brilliance, of witnessing the pristine potential of an unfettered moron, of experiencing the animalistic, bowel evacuating horror of undiminished, soul crushing understanding, and at the same time, fully realizing that it was the spasming shittle of pure genius which was violently evacuating my nether regions!

What seemed like several seconds of that was in actuality only a couple of seconds, and afterward, and to my own chagrin, I emerged from that temporary fugue state, slack-jawed and drooling, to the baffled regard of a customer who was waiting patiently for his receipt... the very receipt which, only seconds before, had elicited the cavalcade of synaptic effluvium from my embradtled brain. I told the customer that there wasn't no way that I was gonna dig around for that stupid piece of receipt paper, and that he couldn't make me do it either, and after that I lay me down to sleep.

Now comes the piebaldism. The moment of revelation. Here goes. What it was that I realized today, Rosario, was that those bunched up and crumpled little bits and pieces of receipt paper aren't aerodynamic, AT ALL. In fact, they're the exact opposite of aerodynamic, so that when you toss 'em, the result is just barely, but not quite, pure chaos. They just do whatever and go wherever, which is usually but also always NOT where or what you wanted them to go or do.

Finally, everybody knows...

Don't you feel dumb and sleepy now. Here comes the end.

A dream - old mixed with the... less old

I'm living in Pittsburg again and driving home from class on Dukes Chapel Road. I'm almost to the house, and as I'm pulling into the driveway, I can see that a note has been stuck to the front door. I step onto the porch, and upon approaching the door, I discover that it's not just one note, but several. A stack of old, familiar love notes that I'd written to someone once, and had long since forgotten about.

I pull them off of the door and go inside. As I'm flipping through them, my heart starts to thump in my chest as I realize that the reverse sides of all the notes have new writing on them. The handwriting is unfamiliar though, and as I try to focus on it, it gets blurry and I can't read it.

For a moment I'm confused by the unfamiliar handwriting, and I can't remember who it was that should be making my heart go pitter-patter like this. At first I think that it's Erica, since I'm at the old house on Dukes Chapel Road, but then I realize that over twenty years have gone since then.

I pass by the door to my bedroom several times as I'm puttering about the house, squinting at the old notes with the new handwriting. Finally I look up to see that my bedroom door is open just a crack, and that a tall sliver of yellow light is shining where the edge of the door meets the frame. I'm suddenly very afraid to open that door, because I know that I didn't leave the light on, and I'm sure that I had closed it earlier.

Then the door opens, and Leah is standing there. She's dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing when I laid eyes on her for the first time... a brown, floor length skirt decorated with flowers and paisleys and a thin, dark green button up sweater with long sleeves and a pair of sandal shoes, with her hair pulled back into a kind of bunched up pony tail.

The surprise and the sudden realization feels like a solid blow to my midsection, and I fall backwards and hit the wooden floor, hard. As I'm sitting there on my ass, stunned, I look up and I can see Leah's silhouetted form standing in the doorway, surrounded by a nimbus of light emanating from the room behind her. I raise my forearm in an attempt to shield my eyes from the bright, disorienting glare.

Then she takes a step toward me and leans forward, effectively blocking the light, and I can see her face clearly as she smiles and reaches for my hand to help me to my feet.

America, the... cute, I guess.

I was walking North on Fulton and I heard that hawk sound. You know, the hawk sound? The one that goes with the purple mountains majesty, and the soaring heights and the vast expanse of glorious natural fundament, and the tired Indian on the tired horse and all that stuff? You know, the hawk sound. It goes... let's see. Kinda like a, it's a, uh... kind of a screeeAAA...ch...uh. With a sort of raspy thing on the end of it. Geez, it's in all the movies and commercials.

Anyway, that sound. So I stopped, cocked my ear, and said, "Do that again!"

And it did it again, and I used my built in sonar to determine the direction from which it... what's the correct word... Uh, absorbed in reverse, deabsorbed, and I looked in that direction, and there was this little bird about three inches long sitting on this thing under a thing.

Well, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was just about ready to get severely pissed off, but I didn't yet, so I looked at that bird and said, "Do it again, I dare you."

And it opened its stupid little beak and went scrEEEaaa...fyunch...click...ch.

So. That's it then, I guess. It ain't a hawk that makes that sound. It's this puny little... SQUAB. Thanks, SQUAB, for taking a tremendous SQUAT on forty years of hardwired memories.

You're welcome.

Ooooooh CRAP I just figured out one of the level-ups in real life! I'll go ahead and tell everybody for free, because I'm just that kinda guy.

What it is, is when you're cleaning up your compartment, or your domicile, or abode, or asylum, castle, special dump, memorable hell hole, where you hang your stupid hipster hat, whatever you call it, when you're doing that, here's what you gotta remember to do.

All you gotta do is start at the front near the front door, and work yourself forcibly through the trash and toward the back, cleaning and wiping and sweeping and smoking and stuff all the while, and then!

Then, once you've reached the back, near the bathroom, and all of the flotsam and jetsam and flora and fauna and detritus and toxic waste is all pushed up close together into that one space, all you gotta do after that is to keep throwing little bits of whatev into it, until it becomes so dense that you get a quantum singularity some day, and all the crap that's shoved in there gets sucked away into the eleventh dimension. Then you're finally done.

First though - and this is the most important part, and you can't just skip it, because it's required in order for the whole thing to work - first you have to have been awake for a long long long long long long long long time, because otherwise you won't get realistic hallucinations, and it won't be convincing, and you won't believe none of it really happened at all.

Shokinaw!

See that? The picture? More often than not, that's what makes me go ass-over-teakettle when I'm walking and minding my own beeswaxiness. I'll give a brief description of what it's like to encounter that thing in the picture:

Ok.

It's dark out, and I'm walking on the sidewalk (when there is a sidewalk, otherwise it's either in somebody's yard, or right in the big-ass middle of the road), just tooling along, listening to music or typing up some kind of crap like this, or filling up my brain crevices with words and pictures from teh interwub, when suddenly, and without warning...

AMBUSH! SNEAK ATTACK! SHOKINAW!

Suddenly my steady stridely impetus is violently interrupted! I find myself without forward leg support, and my cerebellum goes into overdrive, commanding the other leg to HURRY UP, HURRY UP, HURRY UP! while at the same time, activating the OMCS (override manual control sequence) procedure for my arms, forcing both of them to enact violent pinwheeling counter-rotations! An emergency application of centripetal force as a brutal attempt to absorb the unexpected and violent downward/forward momentum of the core personage! Blatant chaos ensues, as Order and Entropy grapple for control of the application of Pure And Unaligned Motive Energy!

Whew. Luckily I caught myself this time, because my cerebellum kicks ass, just like my immune system.

So... Does that sound exciting? Dramatic? Does the description capture the 'Holy Crap, All Balls Out, One-And-A-Half Second Struggle For Control', describing the brief but furious battle between the Dark side and the Light? The fight to keep me, myself, I, from doing a violent and abrupt faceplant on the concrete sidewalk, likely resulting in yet another broken hand/phone combo?

I hope it came across that way, because that's the only reason why I took that picture and typed up all of this crap and put it online.

That dog, again.

I'm walking to Kroger with headphones on, oblivious, and a brown wind goes tearing by and brushes my leg. This startles the craptaculations out of me at first, for almost exactly one second, and then I see this brown, long legged dog gallivanting clumsily ahead of me. I bust out laughing, but I can't hear myself because of the headphones.

This dog follows me almost the whole way, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes taking a side trail, but always coming back to just ahead of me. It's got a collar and tags, but my phone ran out of minutes yesterday. No, this here phone is just for Wi-Fi.

After about ten minutes of that dog, and about fifty yards ahead, I see this guy and this girl sitting in their car with the doors open. That dog tears off at warp speed, into that car, and ALL over those two kids and inside that car like a berserk thing. It's like that cartoon where everything becomes a chaotic blur of motion, with a foot or a paw or a leg or a hand or a head sticking out briefly and getting sucked back in again.

Just as I pass by the car, all three of 'em pop out at the same time, each one from a different door. I remove my headphones.

"Is that your dog?" Says I.

"NO!" Says they.

The truth about me.

The truth about me.

I'm 45 years old and can't quite believe it. I still feel like a kid, but a kid lost in time and separated from everyone, permanently and naturally. I've always been out of synch. If I could just trip over a cosmic string, I might could get jolted into the place where I should belong.

More truth about me.

When I hear music, I get emotional. That's normal, so everything's ok so far, but I feel ashamed when music makes me cry. I feel dirty and worthless. I feel like I need to cover myself up in every scrap of clothing I have, and get under the covers with the lights off, and hide from my emotional reaction.

More truth about me.

I am an addict. I'm not a heroin junkie, or an alcoholic, or a crackhead, or a psychonaut, or a tweaker. I'm addicted to anything that will give me some relief from the constant pain of just being, and whatever that chemical is, that's what I'm addicted to. I'm addicted to anything artificial that offers an escape from the sharp, abrasive edges and surfaces of the unsympathetic passage of time. Melodramatic, but true.

More truth about me.

I'd give my kidney to a stranger if they needed it. I'm one of the good guys. Maybe I'm kidding myself as the shadow of my purpose is cast against the stark, white and pure surface of the Truth... but in my mind, I believe that I am, at least a little, and I don't think that I'm insane.

Some more.

I'm a selfish bastard, and an angry, unforgiving asshole. I know this is true about myself, and the knowledge of it hurts, like knives cutting me all over. It don't hurt enough for me to make any kind of real effort to do anything about it though, because enduring it is easier than trying to get away from it or change it, because I'm lazy.

I used to get pleasure out of things like drawing, playing video games, playing guitar, washing dishes, taking care if myself, hell... drugs took all of that away from me. I don't know if it's permanent, but it seems that way. I still get pleasure out of reading though... man, I dunno what I'll do if that ever goes away.

More.

I'm afraid of everything. Everything. I always have been, and it's always been this way. There weren't no distressing, traumatic event that made it this way. Not one that I can remember, anyway.

I'm afraid, really afraid about what happens to the music in my head when I die.

I think about suicide all the time, but I'm too chickenshit to ever do it.

I put myself to sleep with violent thoughts. Like a lullaby.

I want to live, but I'm being killed by the beauty of the world. I realized that a couple of years ago. Isn't that weird? It's a conundrum.

I'm just a tad bit insane, and I'm not even trying to be funny. I know I said that I wasn't a few lines up, but when you're insane, it's easy to forget that. You know what I mean?

I hate myself. Hate hate hate myself. Why? I don't know why, really. I don't deserve to hate myself.

I've killed three people. There ain't no evidence for it, and nobody outside of myself would ever believe it or think that my reasons were legitimate, but I can't escape from it. My one, single life isn't worth three people. So, there it is.

I think I'm good looking, and that's the sole, precarious basis for my own self worth, so I decorate myself in ways that are off putting and repugnant.

I really, really really REALLY want to believe in God.

From what I understand, peace isn't something you ever actually attain... it's just something that you experience now and then. In short BURSTS.

I carry a grudge for a LONG TIME. Sorry... but only for mortal wounds and insults, k?

I'm gonna feel embarrassed about posting this after I've slept, and I know this now, but I'm still compelled to do it because I'm pathologically shy with a ginormous ego. Dang, that's gonna hurt.

I'm a sucker for pain, as long as I'm the one inflicting it on myself.

Even after all of that though... I really am one of the good guys, and I'm carrying the fire. I promise.

Oh... and I hope all of this is entertaining. Really, I do.

I hope that's enough.

New York Schwa

I just realized something pretty dadgum stupid. You know how, um... how to explain it...

Like, a New York accent. Imagine somebody saying 'shirt'. It would sound kinda like 'shureet', with the 'uree' all kinda on top of itself and falling out as one sound, like saying 'uhhee' at the top of your throat with the back of your tongue.

See what I mean? There ain't no phonetic representation of that sound. No letter or combination of letters to express it. You have to waste five minutes of precious life just trying to explain it.

What is that anyway? Howcome there ain't a letter for that? I mean, there's a schwa for some kind of sound that nobody cares about, howcome there ain't one for that?

Well, I'll invent one then. That's a New York schwa.

I wasn't born, I was enrolled.

I was scrolling down my face book thing wallago, and man, that takes forever... and anyway, I get ALL the way down to March 25th, 1971, and you'd think that it would say, 'this guy got borned today'... but nooooo! It says, 'March 25th, 1971. Started school at Starfleet Academy'.

Star Bores - The Gritty Reboot

I watched the new Star Bores movie tonight. Wow! That was the best remake I've ever seen! Holy cow! They even had all of the same actors playing the same characters! Ham Yoyo, Princess Laidup, Creepio, Barstool, Chew-bacco, Lube Guystalker, Garth Gaydar (an albeit melted one), and even Oldie Von Moldie! Super cool!

I thought it was great how this movie followed the original movie EXACTLY, with the poor kid on Tattooine scratching out a living, and then escaping in the Aluminum Beercan in the nick of time with this fat dreidel that has the secret hologram in its SD card, just like Barstool in the original Star Bores!

Then there was that part where the stormtrooper rescued that other guy, what's his face... who was that, anyway? I thought the Saarlac got him. Anyway, that happened, then the helmet comes off, and SURPRISE, I'm here to rescue you, and I have your dreidel, plus I also got this hella fine chick! Let's go!

Then Ham Yoyo gets killed at the Death Star Planet, just like Oldie Von Moldie in the first one, and everybody got pissed off, and a bunch of  innocent stormtroopers got blasted on the way out! Awesome!

Oh yeah, and the Death Star Planet blew up a planet with the Death Ray. A bunch of planets. I thought that was going a little overboard, but whatever.

Then after all that stuff happens, there's this countdown that Death Thing has to wait for before it can blow up the... rebels? Rabble rousers? Resistance! That's it. So the resistance blows up the Death Star instead, because it had this secret vulnerable spot right there on the surface, and it wasn't just two meters... that dadgum thing was like, a gazillion times bigger than a womprat! So some x-wings fly down the trench and blow up the whole damn thing in the nick of time! Wow, I never even saw that coming!

There was even a party in this cantina bar thing, and a big ugly emperor hologram thing, and a Garth Gaydar type dude who got seduced by the dork side of the farce, just like that other guy from the other movie! SUPER COOL!

The one thing that really surprised me was when Oldie Von Moldie showed up at the end! I can't believe that guys still alive, man! Plus, didn't he already get the sword put to him by Gaydar in Star Bores, part 4?

Anyway. Great gritty reboot of Star Bores!

The language of the wind

I just thought of something amazing. Check it out. Consider this:

It's windy tonight. Normally I hate the wind. I curse it! It's cold. If it ain't cold, then it's blowing my hair everywhere. If it ain't blowing my hair everywhere, it's touching my skin. If it ain't touching my skin, it's blowing all of the trash out of the parking lot, so that I don't have an excuse to go outside and sweep so that I can smoke. If it ain't blowing all of the trash out of the parking lot, it's blowing out my lighter so that I can't even light my cigarette. If it ain't doing any of those things, then it's probably bothering somebody else, somewhere. Wind. Stupid, buttheaded wind! Right?

Check it out though... and I only just realized this, about half an our ago, the thing with wind. See, the thing with wind, is...

First, you know trees? Wind blows trees every which way. We all know that, but what happened tonight was... and I'm being totally serious... I'm not even trying to be funny. What happened tonight, about half an hour ago was this.

I was sitting in my compartment after work, just sitting there with the lights out and the door open, trying to air the place out. A tiny space like my compartment gets stinky with cigarette smoke and scorched vegetable oil and heaps and heaps of neglected laundry and stacks of dishes and skid marked underwear and a bathroom nook that was designed without a door and a commode that wasn't designed to process the sheer volume of 32 craps a day after a month of remission, and the good intentions of Febreeze can only go so far...

... and as I was sitting there, just kind of existing as a thing, I could hear the wind blowing outside. I thought it was my ceiling fan at first, but then I saw the tree leaves blowing on the trees. I thought...

'That's pretty damn cool, those tree leaves blowing, and the sound they make.'

I wanted to go out into them and hear them up close, so I went outside (after buttoning up the compartment) and after I got out there, I saw this tree across the street. Man, it was blowing up a storm with its leaves, just going all over the place, like some insane, gesticulating kind of sign language of the vegetable kind, like it was a genuine frikin' emergency! ALL LEAFY GREEN WOODEN THINGS, LOOK AT ME, LOOK OVER HERE, THIS IS FUCKING IMPORTANT!!!

That's what that tree was saying, in wind language. And I understood, at that moment, about the wind. And the trees. And everything that those things are inside of... that the wind is, that the blowing winds are the nerve impulses of an immense, slow motion alive thing, and the trees are the hands, the vocal cords, the contracting irises, the vibrating tympanum, the muscles which receive the impulses, of this alive thing, and then I thought...

What the heck am I? Holy shit, I'm a part of it... And it was less of a question, and more of just a curious musing of how awesome it was.

My immediate peril

Ok. OK OK OK!

This has happened before, what I'm about to describe, and it serves to demonstrate my immediate peril. My life, that is. Danger Wil Robinson! DANGER, YOU STUPID KNUCKLEHEAD!

What happened before was this:

About a year ago, I had clocked out from work, and I had just about made it to the curb when I almost turned myself inside out, screaming inside of my head:

OH MY GOODNESS OH MY GOODNESS OH MY GOODNESS WHERE'S MY WHERE'S MY PHONE WHERE'S MY PHONE???

I went cacadoodypoopoo crazy for almost an hour looking for that dadgum phone, and I'd just about driven the guys on third shift bananas going on and on and on with all of my goings on about it. Every time I'd come frantically pinwheeling back into the store, screaming about the stupid thing, they'd go:

DIDJA FIND IT DIDJA FIND IT DIDJA FIND IT???

Everybody almost had a stroke that night. Then what happened was this loud, smelly fart sound with the wha-wha-wha-wha-WHAAAAAAAAAAA....!!! trombone thing that signifyies the announcement of the stupid loser. Here he is, the moron, the dumbass, the guy with the minus 4000 IQ, in the flesh. And that's when I discovered the phone, plugged up and charging, just where I'd left it, on purpose.

That whole thing just happened again tonight.

See, what worries me is this... One day this scenario will play out, YET AGAIN... only next time when it does, I'll DIE!!!

Because it won't be my phone I've misplaced, it'll be my DIALYSIS MACHINE!!!

Glimpses

The way it seems to me, frequently, and for the most part of my life, is that I'm surrounded by a bubble containing the things that make me feel. Such a rich environment, but so small. So contained. So cut off from a lot of things that I have a strong suspicion should matter to me.

And these possible things that matter, they are all the more important, because they're never known or realized fully. I only catch glimpses of strange, important attractions that are happening all around me, full of the meaning of things, but I can only ever discern vague synonyms of the truth.

This is the root of what's wrong with me, I think. I believe that I've just said it fairly clearly. When I read what I just wrote back to myself, I'm surprised that all I need to correct is just a little grammar.

I wonder about myself a lot, mostly because I'm the only sure thing that I can be unsure about. Because I'm inside of me, and I can see my reflection from the outside in. I can't see anyone else like that. I don't think anyone else can, either, except for a living saint, maybe.

So what am I yammering about anyway? I ask myself that. I guess it's just the Question. The always unsolved thing that moves the mitochondria in our cells so that we can continue to try to figure stuff out, because not doing that means death.

If I were to try to say something deep about things, as a product of all of that stuff I just went on about, it would be that figuring out stuff hurts, which is natural, and that we must discern the answers to things through a pain filter.

It seems like an oversimplified, kindergarten answer to a PhD question. And so what? Maybe the meaning of life really is 42. Maybe there is such a thing as infinite mind, which makes our mental meanderings seem like the consciousness of cockroaches.

A feeling of a memory

I just remembered something.

The thing is though, I don't know if I'm actually remembering a piece of awake time or a dream. It's just a snippet.

It's a description of a person who, for some forgotten reason, has to experience every type of pain that is possible to feel.

I remember a couple of specific ones... the torture of not being able to breathe, turned up to maximum strength. That's one. Crushed bones and burning alive are some others.

Mental anguish is included, too. Fear, depression, shame, and heartache are there, cranked up to eleven.

It feels like a memory of something I read, or a dream I had. It feels like a dream, but I don't remember remembering it.

Isn't that weird?